Category: Public Health

When mental health professionals don’t take insurance, only the wealthy can afford their help. There’s something that really bothers Stanford psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys. When he thinks of all the years he has spent training the next generation of psychiatrists, the enormous investment in medical school and residency, he wants

The Blackwell’s Island asylum was built by New York City in 1839 to house growing numbers of people with mental illness. It was plagued by crowding and lack of funding. In 1887, crusading journalist Nellie Bly feigned madness and lived there for 10 days. This engraving is dated 1866. Mental

Why do people act the way they do? Many of us intuitively gravitate toward explaining human behavior in terms of personality traits: characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that tend to be stable over time and consistent across situations. This intuition has been a topic of fierce scientific debate

Luc Ennekans, 51, is deeply attached to his host, Toni Smit. That’s caused some friction in Smit’s marriage. At the center of Geel, a charming Belgian town less than an hour’s drive from of Antwerp, is a church dedicated to Dymphna, a saint believed to have the power to cure

William Kitt has lived in a studio apartment in New York owned by the nonprofit Broadway Housing Communities for 13 years, after decades of living on the streets. Editors’ note: It’s Invisibilia bonus time! Sometimes we’ve got more wonderful stories than we can fit into the Invisibilia show and podcast.

Her income as a New Orleans singer fluctuates with the tourist season, says Lisa Lynn Kotnik, and that’s made health insurance too expensive in the past. Now that she has a Medicaid card, getting the health care and medicine she needs should be easier. Lisa Lynn Kotnik has been a

Gregory “Buster” Coleman in his cap and gown. Each graduate of the Kennedy School of Government carried an inflatable globe. Gregory “Buster” Coleman is a cop who’s been through a lot. He was the Liberian National Police Commissioner during the Ebola outbreak. He and his men would wear protective equipment

Tests you can take at home to check for colorectal cancer are now recommended on par with colonoscopy. It’s a predictable passage in life: Hit 50, get lots of birthday cards with old-age jokes, a mailbox full of AARP solicitations — and a colonoscopy. But millions of Americans — about

A police officer inspects a fishing boat in Thailand. The U.S. State Department issued its annual Trafficking in Persons report on Thursday, and the big news is the status of Thailand. Thailand is now on the “Tier 2 Watch List” for countries that do not meet the minimum U.S. standards

Keyon Harrold performs at this year’s Melbourne International Jazz Festival. He’s the co-founder of “Compositions For A Cause.” “Running (Refugee Song)” was released this week in honor of World Refugee Day. It’s the first composition from a new venture called Compositions for a Cause, a collaboration of musicians Keyon Harrold

Markets

President Obama speaks at the SelectUSA Investment Summit in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Concerns about a possible “Brexit” were floating in the air as British investors met with state economic teams at the two-day summit. If you’re on the economic development team for your state, you are happy — dancing-in-the-street

Treatments

When mental health professionals don’t take insurance, only the wealthy can afford their help. There’s something that really bothers Stanford psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys. When he thinks of all the years he has spent training the next generation of psychiatrists, the enormous investment in medical school and residency, he wants